cdrov

Hi guys. I have a very strange problem. Untli recently i had a very well working system
Asus p4C800 Deluxe
1GB Geil Memory
Asus V9900 128MB
2 WD 120JB PATA
2 WD 200B PATA (1internal and 1 external in an external enclosure)
1 Canopus DVStorm2 (Video editing) Card
CPU Intel 2,8 / 512
1 DVD Recorder Pioneer 108
1 DVD Player Pioneer 119

Everything was fine until i decidet to upgrade the CPU to 3,2 /1MB Prescott
and add a new Seagate SATA Drive 200GB.

At first the seagate drive was very slow, every time i tried to open it the computer hanged and probably needed restart. Finally after a week full of effort i RMA the seagate and got a new one.

Now the new seagate exist in my computer with the other disks but it is significanlty slower than my pata drives. The strange is that Sisoft Sandra reports 54MB/s on SATA Seagate and 44MB/s at most on the other drives (my 1394 external gave 19MB/sec).

Despite that the SATA Drive is very Slow. I copy 3GB from my external drive and needs 5-10 minutes. I copy the same file to a pata and it completes in 2minutes.

I have 2 HDDs and 2 CDROMS on Primary and Secondary Channels
1 HD on Pri Raid (Promise)
1 Sata on SATA1
1 External on 1394 of the board

What could be wrong? In Asus bios i have set (Enhanced mode-SATA-5sec in IDE Configuration) and where the promised is mentioned i have RAID enabled. When i set this option to IDE the drive is even slower (sometime the computer stops responding). The driver i am using is Fastrack 378ATA (says in control panel). I have tried the FASTrack SATA 378 Driver but then the results are very bad.

Please can you suggest me the correct settings in Bios and the correct Driver to use??
Thank you in Advance

clintfan

Hi cdrov, and welcome to the forum!

Although the mobo claims support of Prescott, the circuit layout was designed years before Prescott came out, and there are issues. Many Prescotts will only run at 2.8GHz even though their core speed is higher, so that could be hurting your performance.

I have also read some Prescott industry reviews suggesting that due to internal architecture of the new chip, it can actually run slower than previous revisions... and we're all familiar with this effect in the OS arena: newer OS's continue to need more and more horsepower compared to their older ancestors.



54MB/s is the normal rate we should expect with the current drive technology, but it depends on how you measure it. You should be able to achieve this when copying, say, a 1GB file between the drive on your PRI_RAID port, and your SATA1 drive (or any of the other drives on the ICH5). However, if you copy the same file amongst the other ICH5 drives, your readings may be lower, perhaps even significantly lower.


What do you mean by "external" drive? 3GB in 300-600 seconds is about 10 to 5MB/s, which would be slow for SATA but respectable for a USB 1.1 "external" drive. Of course if you meant the internal SATA drive on the SATA1 port, you've got a problem.

I'm guessing you chose the Seagate model ST3200822AS, which is a 200GB Barracuda 7200.7 SATA drive. Make sure the jumper block, on the connect end of the drive on the side opposite the power connector, has NO jumpers on it. Also make sure your data cabe is connecting securely at both ends, but isn't strapped down.

Most importantly make sure you installed the Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility which, in IDE mode, is the only other thing that affects your SATA1 port. (You are talking about the "SATA1" port, right? Of the 4 ports on your board, this is the second one down from the top, and is driven by your ICH5 Southbridge chip.)

If you have not installed that ICSIU yet, you should do so immediately, and use the "AFTER" method outlined in the link. EVEN IF you already installed it, in view of your dififculties I think it would be worth RE-installing it, using the AFTER method, because something may have gotten corrupted. IN fact it sounds like your drive may have dropped into a slow-performing basic PIO data mode, possibly due to lack of the proper INF configuration data, which the ICSIU provides.

There's no uninstalling... you just update drivers right over the top of what you have. I just did this myself last week using the latest ZIP file from Intel, updating drivers one by one in DeviceManager from SAFE mode, to try to cure some slowness in my system. That reinstall went fine and I get 52-54MB/s (although my problem --slow first-time opening of programs-- remains, and seems to be shared by many others on TSF's XP forum, but with no solutions in sight).

Hope this helps,

-clintfan

cdrov

sorry i answered in the quate first time forum user

clintfan

To quote some text, paste the portion of text you want and surround it with quote controls, like this... I'll use curly braces to explain it, but you really need to use square braces....

{quote}any text you want to quote{/quote}
(but use [ and ], not { and } )

For example, to quote the next stuff, I type {quote} and then paste the passage and finish up with {/quote}. I've done it so much it's pretty mindless and I usually don't make a typo.



I think the comparison would hold for same-GHz ratings. Meaning certain benchmarks probably show that a 3.2E Prescott processor performs a bit slower than a 3.2C Northwood processor. But performance is sensitive to the particular application. Benchmark tools are only a relative comparison measure and run in batch mode, and may not match what you notice when you use the machine interactively.



The 1394 has to run through your VIA VT6307 Firewire chip. This chip is on the PCI bus. In this instance I think the firewire will be the slow link in the chain, not the SATA drive or the PCI bus. Max firewire speed is about 400Mbit/s, or roughly 50MByte/s, not including overhead. Both PCI and SATA can handle this if the proper drivers are installed and the path is clear. But if you copy to another device on PCI, sucg as any drive attached to the Promise chip, there will be a lot of collisions and your throughput will drop significantly.



Let's make sure I have your configuration straight. This is how I understood your system originally, I'll letter the drives for reference:

PRI_IDE Master= C= WD 120JB PATA
PRI_IDE Slave= D= WD 120JB PATA
SEC_IDE Master= E= CDROM1
SEC_IDE Slave= F= CDROM2
SATA1= G= Seagate 200GB (new)
SATA2= H
SATA_RAID1= I
SATA_RAID2= J
PRI_RAID= K= WD 200B PATA
firewire= L= WD 200B PATA

Among these ports, H, I, J & K are all on PCI. Ports C,D,E,F,G, & H are all in the same ICH5 chip. Within this, G is one controller, H, is another controller, and C-D-E-F is a third controller. We think these all share a common bus inside the chip. Further, C-D share a cable, and E-F share a cable.

Let's guess at some speed rankings among these ports, it would take some simple testing with a 1GB file to validate this...

1. Data moving between C and D, or between E and F should be slowest due to the cable sharing, and also it's within the same controller.
2. Data moved between H,I,J, or K might be next, because it has to go out one device, over PCI to memory, then back over PCI into the other device.
3. Data going between, say, C and E, or D and F should be only slightly faster because it's still activity within the same controller.
4. Data going between, say, C and G should be medium, since it's activity within the same chipset sharing the same internal bus...not too bad but still slow.
5. The fastest data movement should be between ports on PCI and ports not on PCI. For instance, between G and K, or between C and K. Although the PCI bridge is inside the ICH5, testing shows these paths are the fastest on these models.

USB2 runs 480MBit/s (52MByte/s) but again that's the theoretical max and with various overhead you won't achieve it. But less than 19MByte/s sounds pretty low to me, again it would be low if you're copying to PRI_RAID. Devices rated 2.0 will only run 2.0 if their mobo connection allows it, and I think sometimes the 2.0 ports will connect at lower speeds. Not sure.

Your comment about video capture concerns me. Because video capture devices typically run on PCI --e.g. the Firewire 1394 port-- your capture recording drive needs to NOT be on PCI. In particular, the best placement for a recording drive would be port G or H. This assumes the OS is on drive C; this makes either C or D not-ideal for capture recording, due to the OS traffic on that IDE controller.

Conversely, we can see that for burning a CD on port E or F which are not on PCI, the best placement for the source of the data would be a port on PCI, namely port I, J, or K. The way this is typcially done is to configure the recording software to use DAO (Disk At Once) or "Make a copy first" and configure the temp storage area down on one of these ports. Systems configured in this way will perform smoothly during burns (instead of running in jerky fashion with lots of invocations of the "burn proof" feature).



OK, in view of the above analysis let's think about this a minute. What they say is true IF what you want to do is just be able to copy files quickly between, say, port C and I. But if you want to do video capture onto port I, this will work terrible because you're in the PCI-to-PCI case (2.) above.

In summary, your drive placement MUST match your planned usage, or at least most of it, and for the rest of it you'll have to tradeoff some performance.


Read through this ranking analysis and see if you can make sense of it. I hope that it may help you to see why some things you might be trying to do, aren't working as fast as you thought they would. I'm sure I don't understand the complete picture of your plans.

-clintfan

skinnypix

One thought -- are you using the Asus-supplied SATA cables? Try wiggling them at the connectors to see if that impacts transfer speed. I (& others) have had problems with these cables!!

--Alan

cdrov

What can i say, Thank you all very very much. I would say that Guru does not really express what you are !!! In general the configuration is as you described. The only mistake i think exists is that i have on the same cable an HDD and a CDROM (both in primary and Secondary Channels), but i am going to correct it today (in my desparate effort to fix it and having exhausted every possible combination) i bought a huge thermaltake tower 112 for the CPU so i will take the mobo out of the case and change the IDE configuration as you suggested (I hope the letters of the drives won't change so premiere projects will continue to work). What is your opinion about round cables? I bought 2 round shielded cables (they insist that they are!!!!) -one very short and a longer one 60cm i think and i was thinking to use them (i bought new sata cables too you never know). Despite that i am very captious about the seagate drive. I here from times to times and especially when the computer is ready to hang the head trying to do something... a very starnge noise. The benchmarks and the diagnostics about the drive say that it is OK but i can;t tell. I have already RMA it once and today i am thinking of taking back to the shop i got it to give me a new just to be sure.

Thank you again and again and i will post the continue of my odessy soon